Custom Auto Painting - Stencil?

[InjectorService]

Hi guys, I'm looking to do a custom painted cowling for a project I'm working on. I have e enough experience painting that I can complete it myself.

But I would like to have a distressed flag look to it, so I want to have a stencil of sorts. I want to lay down one color, put my stencil on, and then lay down the other color.

Am I going about this right? I was thinking of having the stencil die cut from vinyl.

I literally have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to this part of it. If any of you have custom auto experience or paint experience your help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Chris_Hamilton]

You want to have the stencil cut from the proper type film that can withstand automotive refinish solvents. Some of the vinyls do not play well with solvents and can be messy trying to remove etc. This stuff is pretty much the standard for stencils.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079JB36NG/?tag=atomicindus08-20

Most sign shops (and some print shops) can design and print the stencil for you on your stencil paper.

 

[e015475]

I did this aluminum side panel to look like an aircraft skin for a sand car I built ten years ago. The Corvette logo, tribal design and the goofy aircraft signage were all done using vinyl masks cut at a local sign shop. The red part is HOC candy red but everything else is OneShot sign painters enamel applied with an airbrush. (the rivets were all done with an airbrush and stencils) I shot a few coats of clear over it and it held up quite well. The base color was powder coat aluminum over a 6061 sheet. I raised-up the center of the panel on my bead roller to add a bit of dimensional interest and to keep the panel from vibrating too much.

It is kind of subtle, but the tribal design is outlined in blue. I did that with vinyl pinstriping tape and used OneShot and a badger pinstriping brush to apply it.

The tribal design image was lifted from a company's website that sold vinyl stickers to ricers. Same for the Vette logo - stolen (or is it plagiarized?) The aircraft stencils were easy to do from scratch on vector graphics software.

For this one, I imported the images into Adobe Illustrator and used the Bezier tool to trace it and get it to where I liked it. Once I had the vector art done and cleaned up, I sized it and created a .pdf file for the sign shop - one file for each image element.

The sign shop printed me a full size paper image as a proof before they cut the vinyl.

I did all the airbrush and painting work while I was bored out of my mind after knee-replacement surgery and couldn't really walk very far. I spent about a week at it, but I wasn't moving very fast.

Here's the panel installed on the car (and Gizmo, the cat)



You certainly don't need Adobe Illustrator and vector graphics isn't too hard to learn. Inkscape is the freeware version and I've used it for various projects over the years and it works well. Learning curve isn't very steep, but if you don't want to go down it, you can usually find somebody on CL who'll do it for you for a little bit of cash.

 

[e015475]

Just another thought - distressed flags are all the rage these days and you can probably buy a vector file you can scale to the size that you need.

Try searching "distressed flag vector art"

To manipulate it, download Inkscape here-

Download Inkscape 1.2.2 | Inkscape

None

inkscape.org